1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to a method for the rapid manufacture of aluminum alloy components and can have specific application to limited production runs, such as those encountered in rapid prototyping or rapid manufacturing. More particularly it relates to a method whereby a porous aluminum or first aluminum alloy preform is formed into a desired shape and supported by a polymeric binder. A second aluminum alloy is caused to infiltrate the porous preform forming a dense structurally sound component.
2. Description of the Related Art
Aluminum and aluminum alloy components are traditionally fabricated by casting, mechanical working or machining, as well as combinations of these processes. When casting, molten metal fills a mould having an internal cavity formed into the shape of a desired component. After the molten metal cools and solidifies, the component is removed from the mould in either net shape (finished form) or near net shape (close to finished form, but requiring some additional working or machining). When mechanical working, such as forging, drawing, rolling, extrusion or stamping, a cast billet of the metal is mechanically deformed into the shape of the desired component. Casting requires moulds machined to the shape of the desired component while tools used to apply mechanical deformation require dies formed to the required shape. While both casting and mechanical working are well suited for the economical manufacture of large quantities of identically shaped components, neither is particularly suitable for specialty applications or prototypes where only a few components are required or where various aspects of the shape are to be varied from component to component.
Aluminum and aluminum alloy components can also be machined from stock material that may have been mechanically worked or cast. Machining is time consuming, has a very poor utilization of raw material and requires skilled operators. Machined components are therefore expensive and slow to produce.
Aluminum powders can also be used to fabricate parts, either to take advantage of a unique property set or because net shape parts can be inexpensively fabricated. In the former case, the powders are typically consolidated by extrusion, forging or hot isostatic pressing. Net shape parts are made by pressing aluminum powder at extremely high pressures (nominally in excess of 30,000 pounds per square inch) into hard tooling cavities to achieve green densities as high as 95%. After pressing, the part is ejected from the die and the so-called green body is sintered in a furnace at elevated temperatures under a controlled atmosphere, commonly nitrogen. Aluminum, and aluminum alloys, have a propensity to form a highly stable alumina (Al2O3) surface film that passivates the individual powder particles limiting further oxidation. The surface oxide also hinders the diffusional mechanisms needed to sinter aluminum powder preforms into fully dense aluminum components. As a solution to this challenge, the aluminum powder industry has developed blends of aluminum powder, surface oxide reducing agents, lubricants and sintering agents. All of these technologies require tooling or dies which are used to shape the part. This tooling is expensive and is time consuming to produce. This delays the time needed to introduce new products and increases their cost.
An alternative production strategy produces three-dimensional objects directly from the manipulation of data from computer aided design (CAD) databases. Various technologies are known to produce such parts, particularly through the use of additive processes as opposed to subtractive processes such as conventional machining. Important additive processes for the production of such parts include stereolithography, selective laser sintering, laminated object manufacturing, three-dimensional printing and fused deposition modeling. A common feature of all of these rapid prototyping and rapid manufacturing techniques is that energy and/or material is delivered to a point to produce a solid. A series of lines are then traced out to make a cross-sectional layer and a series of layers formed to make a three dimensional part. In principle, there are as many such potential manufacturing systems as there are ways to write or draw on a surface. Producing components in this way has a number of important advantages over traditional manufacturing processes. Most importantly, parts of any shape can be produced directly from a CAD model without the need for expensive tooling or machining and these can be produced in a small fraction of the time that is typically required of traditional manufacturing operations.
Selective laser sintering is described in more detail in U.S. Pat. No. 4,863,538 to Deckard and three-dimensional printing is described in more detail in U.S. Pat. No. 6,416,850 to Bredt, et al. Both the U.S. Pat. No. 4,863,538 patent and the U.S. Pat. No. 6,416,850 patent are incorporated by reference in their entireties herein. These techniques have been used to fabricate objects made from a variety of materials such as photoset resins, other polymers such as nylon and ethylene butadiene styrene, organic waxes, ceramics such as SiN, and metals, most commonly steel.
Recently, aluminum parts have been produced by selective laser sintering and extrusion freeform fabrication. These aluminum parts were fabricated as polymer/aluminum powder composites and post-processed by burning out the polymer and then sintering the remnant metal powder to full or near-full density, in a manner similar to that used in powder injection molding. However, it is extremely difficult to maintain dimensional accuracy during sintering of such a powder preform because of density gradients in the green part and geometrical constraints. While uniform shrinkage can be incorporated into the initial CAD design, non-uniform shrinkage, or distortion, is more difficult to control reproducibly and to accommodate by design. Because dimensional accuracy is a critical criterion for any rapid prototyping/rapid manufacturing system, the inability to accurately sinter large parts is fatal. Only small aluminum parts can presently be made this way: the limit is approximately 1 cm3.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,828,008 discloses that a permeable ceramic mass is spontaneously infiltrated by a molten aluminum alloy containing at least 1%, by weight, of magnesium and optionally also containing silicon. “Spontaneous infiltration” means that the molten metal infiltrates the permeable mass without the requirement for the application of pressure or vacuum (whether externally applied or internally created). U.S. Pat. No. 4,828,008 is incorporated by reference in its entirety herein.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,020,584 discloses that spontaneous infiltration of a preform formed from a mixture of a powdered matrix metal and a powder filler (ceramic) with a molten metal. It is disclosed that when the powdered matrix metal is aluminum and the filler aluminum oxide, the infiltrating atmosphere forms a skin (such as an oxide or nitrogen compound) on the metal that prevents particle separation. U.S. Pat. No. 5,020,584 is incorporated by reference in its entirety herein.
The dimensional accuracy of a component formed is much improved by infiltration, whether spontaneous, pressure-assisted or vacuum-assisted. The loosely formed powder body is lightly pre-sintered and the porous mass is subsequently infiltrated by a liquid metal at a temperature between the melting point of the infiltrant and the base metal. Because there is so little sintering, there is negligible dimensional change between the preform and the finished part. Numerous systems have been fabricated by the rapid prototyping/rapid manufacturing/infiltration route to date, including Fe—Cu, stainless steel-bronze, ZrB2—Cu and SiC—Mg. Aluminum and aluminum base alloys are a conspicuous omission from the successful metallic infiltration systems. It is theorized that the alumina surface film on the aluminum and aluminum alloy particles may have prevented the infiltration of porous aluminum components.
There remains, firstly, a need for a method to spontaneously infiltrate a porous mass of a first aluminum-base material with a molten second aluminum-base material. In addition, there remains a need for an additive process to manufacture aluminum alloy parts that does not have the above-stated deficiencies. The additive process should result in parts with a density close to the theoretical density of the aluminum alloy and be capable of a high level of dimensional accuracy.